The Therapy of Desire

Recently I’ve returned to Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire as part of my bedtime reading. I had forgotten just how good this book is. Nussbaum’s book is devoted to Hellenistic philosophy, focusing on the thought of the Greek and Roman Skeptics, Epicureans, and Stoics. There she conceives philosophy as a sort of therapy or medicine aimed at producing the good life and healthy souls. The key question is “what is the good life?” This medicine requires an attentiveness to our affects (which are always partially based on our beliefs and judgments), what goals and aims are worth pursuing, questions of how to navigate the arrows that fate throws our way, how to transform our social world to render human flourishing more possible, and so on. The greatest thing about Nussbaum’s book is that it is squarely situated in life and living and questions of what it would mean to attain eudaimonia or live a life characterized by human flourishing. How do we diminish our own suffering and human suffering and live an active life characterized by excellence. These, I think, are the sorts of questions that ethical, social, and political philosophy should focus on.

For years now I’ve had a fascination with the Stoics and the Epicureans. Lucretius, for example, is a key figure for me, as is Epictetus in many respects (I’m just now discovering Cicero and Seneca). Returning to the endless debates surrounding normativity, I suspect this is part of the reason I find myself thoroughly turned off by these discussions. Those who are all lit up by issues surrounding normativity sometimes ask questions like “why does anyone desire the truth?” or “why do people desire a life characterized by flourishing and the absence, so far as possible, of suffering?” These questions strike me as both perverse and bizarre. At the beginning of the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes between relative goods and absolute goods. A relative good is a good that is good because of how it is conducive to some other end. Money, for example, is a relative good in that it serves the end of promoting other ends. By contrast, things such as eudaimonia, happiness, or human flourishing, health, and so on are desired for their own sake. If someone asks you “why do you desire happiness?” you just look at them quizzically and respond “because I desire happiness.” The desire for happiness, flourishing, health and so on are things that require no reason to be desired.

The only folks I ever hear use the word “normativity” are folks who focus on rule based models of norms (this, I think, has a lot to do with the deep influence of Kantian moral philosophy on these thinkers). However, it seems to me that a focus on rules is already to situate the question of ethics in the wrong way. The question of ethics is not a question of what sort of rules we use in deciding between right and wrong, but rather the question of what form of life, what sort of practices, what ways of relating to others, and so on produce the good life, human flourishing. As Nussbaum argues, the issue here is closer to that of medicine than law. Answering these questions involve forays into psychology to determine the causes of various forms of affective suffering and how they might be alleviated. It involves forays into sociology to determine what forms of society produce human suffering and human flourishing. It involves forays into political theory to determine what forms of action might produce social change. It even involves forays into nutrition and diet to determine the various ways in which food effects us.

In suggesting this alternative model of ethical thought, heavily influenced by the Stoics, Epicureans, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Freud, and so on, the champions of normativity are likely to respond with the declaration that we require some sort of norm, some sort of rule that allows us to distinguish between good social institutions and bad social institutions, good ways of thinking and feeling and bad ways of thinking and feeling, and so on. “By what criteria”, they will ask, “are you are able to conclude that one sort of social institution is superior to another?” They are not wrong to demand such a norm, but once again I think they think about these norms in the wrong way. These norms are similar to how health functions in medicine. I require no “rule” to determine that health is superior to the flu. I feel like hell when I have the flu, I feel good when I am in a state of health. Having experienced both I am able to easily choose between the two. The same is similar with psychological states, ways of thinking, affects or the difference between passions that perpetually disturb me and those that fill me with joy, and social institutions that are wretched and fill life with drudgery, monotonous repetition, and tremendous suffering and worry and those that allow me to pursue my own goals and aims in peace and with positive collective relations. Having experienced both we can distinguish between them. Having the record of human history we can distinguish between them. Through literature and art we learn about different lives. We are witness to the beautiful lives of others. The issues here are closer to psychotherapy and sociology than law. Moreover, they are empirical, not matters of a priori rules that precede engagement. Hellenistic ethics is where it’s at.

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35 Responses to “The Therapy of Desire”

Surprisingly humanist! Ethics is about “How do we diminish our own suffering and human suffering and live an active life characterized by excellence.” Really? You spend a lot of time talking about the ontological importance of objects–where are they when it comes to ethics? Aren’t you affirming a rather naive distinction between humans, on the one hand, who are worthy of ethical consideration and everything else, on the other, who is not?

Your remarks here, on all counts, suggest that you are not a regular reader of this blog. Are you in the habit of making accusational claims while lacking a background knowledge of war you’re challenging?

There are plenty of particularists who fight tooth and nail against rule-based and deontic conceptions of theoretical and practical rationality but who nevertheless frame their work in terms of normativity. Jonathan Dancy has even edited a book called Normativity.

So too, despite my preoccupation with normativity, I certainly oppose the emphasis which people like Pete and Reid place on rules (whether these rules are explicit or implicit in social practice). I’m more drawn to the Aristotelian response to matters of value which supplements rules and explicit criteria with an account of phronesis and aisthesis (much like in Nussbaum’s work). However, I see much deeper continuties between these approaches to ethics and rational action in general than you seem to allow here. Perhaps it is merely a question of emphasis and linguistic usage but I take this to be a debate within the territory of normativity — arguments all addressed to the nature of the good and the right in thought and action — rather than between ‘normativists’ and ‘non-normativists.’ In short, this is a plea for ‘norm’ not to become an overly totemic word that creates two separate camps of inquirers, when in fact it is that there are different approaches to roughly the same sort of problematic.

Good to see you (re)reading Nussbaum though! She’s certainly in my top 5 contemporary philosophers (and a model of how the history of philosophy can be done without excessive pedantry and boring scholaticism!).

Your post discusses (1) ethics and (2) humans, with reference to a book written by a humanist philosopher. At no point do you make any reference to anything that isn’t human. Correct me where I’m wrong. Not even a throw away line, “What would it mean for a microwave to flourish?”(Although, to capture the genre, I should have written, “a microwave, a diesel city-bus, a lunchbox, a line of C++ code, a rainbow, a smile, four chocolate bars, and a two-legged cat.”) This is a genuinely interesting question, one which apparently does not even occur to you in a context of a discussion of flourishing! I’ve been waiting for serious discusses of politics and ethics from you and your colleagues. I’d like to see how you connect your ontology to these given your premise that ontology is a domain distinct from politics and does not imply a politics–a proposition which I agree with. It hasn’t materialized. (Baiting the religious doesn’t count.)

You’re behaving like a troll. First, I have written a number of posts outlining why I believe questions about nonhuman objects are relevant to questions about human social and political life. Apparently you have not read these posts or forgot them. Second, consideration of objects does not exclude consideration of humans. Perhaps you missed it, but OOO has consistently argued that humans are objects among objects. You thought humans were something other than objects? Third, consideration of questions of human flourishing does not exclude questions about the flourishing of other entities or questions of how humans should relate to other entities. Pardon me if I’m a bit impatient with your remarks, but given that literally hundreds of pages have been written here on these issues I take objection to you jumping in from out of nowhere making rather snide remarks that reflect that you haven’t engaged with any of this material.

This might be an analytic/continental divide issue. The only continentalists I ever see use the term “normativity” are those coming out of a strongly Kantian ethical orientation (Habermas, especially comes to mind). I’m not sure where you get the impression that I have a problem with rational action. Kant and his descendants don’t own the copyright on the concept of rationality (i.e., the idea of something that arises from reason alone). Spinoza, the Stoics, the Epicureans present a very different model of rationality akin to what I allude to in this post.

This is a good example of why I will never start a blog. Graham’s recent observation that people behave on the net in ways they would NEVER behave face-to-face is so wonderfully illustrated here. Craig, you couldn’t think of a better way of asking about nonhuman ethics (which, as Levi mentioned, has been discussed many times on this blog) than with your immediately rude and sarcastic “really?” and “affirming a naive distinction” post? Good lord! There has to be a HTML asshole code — just put the code in the beginning and end of your post, and, bingo!, you transform a genuinely interesting question into the most condescending and annoying post possible. It’s right next to the italic and bold code, I believe.

Graham’s recent observation that people behave on the net in ways they would NEVER behave face-to-face is so wonderfully illustrated here.

Sadly I’ve found this not to be true, especially at larger conferences (the big national meetings of a whole field, as opposed to friendlier, smaller symposia). there seems to always be a person, often a senior and well-respected professor, who gets up and asks a sort of trollish question. Someone will be presenting a particular bit of work within Topic X, and the questioner will ask something along the lines of, “well this is all well and good, but isn’t Topic X sort of discredited nonsense to begin with?”

There is a scope ambiguity in the sentence where I mention rational action. It wasn’t my intention to claim that you thought that ethics had no relation to rational action. Rather, I simply wanted to suggest that there was more room for rapprochement between these competiting conceptions of ethics (as examples of practical rationality in general) than it might appear, since they are both oriented by a similar constellation of issues about the nature of goodness and rightness in action. Obviously, I do not think that Kantians have any special license to the notion of rationality (for one, it would make a nonsense of my own non-Kantian rationalism).

I agree with you that it is an advantage of Hellenistic ethics that it closes down at least some of the ‘foundational’ questions about normativity that trouble some neo-Kantians (especially regarding motivation). But it does seem to me that there is a great deal of continuity here too such that it is no stretch to say that the Stoics and Epicureans were interested in metanormative and first-order normative issues too. Perhaps, as you say, this is a matter of usage which is broader in more analytic philosophy (and so the issue is relatively dull and trivial). But I think that it is often the broader sense of the normative which is in play amongst critics of OOO, even if these critics happen to draw on some Kantian resources and themes. In short, I think it is helpful to keep in mind that deontology is just one species of the genus normativity.

Yes, I understand Tom, but already I think the word itself defines the terms of the debate and channels thought in particular directions. From dictionary.com:

–adjective

1. of or pertaining to a norm, esp. an assumed norm regarded as the standard of correctness in behavior, speech, writing, etc.

2. tending or attempting to establish such a norm, esp. by the prescription of rules: normative grammar.

3. reflecting the assumption of such a norm or favoring its establishment: a normative attitude.

Already, within this definition, we get all the features that eudaimonistic approaches are trying to avoid. In referencing correctness of behavior we get an emphasis on discussions of normativity as revolving around judgment and the judgment of behavior. In talk of “establishing” a norm, we get a focus on rules and prescriptions. In discussions of establishing norms, we get a focus on governance or regulation. Now, of course, philosophers use terms in technical ways that depart from ordinary usage, but I feel this term is extremely loaded and that, by and large, those who, in my experience, use this term focus on all three of the things listed here.

By contrast, the eudaimonistic tradition I’m talking about hardly focuses on these things at all. Lucretius and Cicero aren’t particularly obsessed with judging the correctness of the actions of others. Rather, they are concerned with overcoming fear, anxiety, and all those superstitions that trouble one’s soul. Similarly, they focus on their belief and judgments and how these beliefs and judgments produce certain affective states. They aren’t particularly interested in rules or rule following, but in practices that promote peace of mind, freedom from anxiety, and flourishing. While Cicero and Seneca are certainly concerned with politics, they are not concerned with politics in the regulatory sense, but in the sense of analyzing those institutions and belief systems that tend to pervert souls and produce human suffering. Speaking of these issues in terms of “normativity” already strikes the wrong note at the level of connotations and tends to guide discussions in a particular direction. I believe it’s a term best abandoned unless one comes out of that Kantian tradition. Far better to just speak of ethics and eudaimonia.

Also, I don’t want to get into an argument with anyone, but Levi did mentioned the way in which an everyday objects like food affect us. (I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to extend this to things like adequate housing, medical care, jobs [perhaps reorganized in a different way than they presently are], transportation, etc. This is probably a good example of how other objects outside of humans are worth our consideration.

I take your point that norm-centric vocabulary can have inapposite connotations which arise from its non-philosophical use. So too, there is a tendency to remain at the level of abstraction, talking about ‘normativity’ rather than the gritty details of promoting “peace of mind, freedom from anxiety, and flourishing” and so on. But the abstraction can be an advantage too, since it invites certain helpful analogies between different spheres of rational action. One fairly standardised vocabulary can be used to describe the ethical dimension of our activity alongside its prudential, aesthetic, political, epistemic and semantic dimensions, insofar as one can articulate these in relation to our trying to get things right (in the widest possible sense). Naturally, this standardisation comes with risks of drawing false parallels between heterogenous activities, but the cross-fertilisation that it has allowed has proved very handy (such that metaethicists or social theorists can relatively easily read a philosopher of language like Brandom with profit on these issues, for example).

I sympathise with the fact that it is a term that sets your teeth on edge, so to speak. It will probably be here to stay for a while though and perhaps even in relatively continental circles — especially now that Ray Brassier is reading so much Sellars and Brandom…

But what happens when human flourishing necessitates the suffering of non-human animals? Or better yet, what happens when human flourishing thwarts the flourishing of non-human animals? Philip points out that Levi mentions food and that’s a great place to start. I say this not necessarily to stage a polemic for vegetarianism or “becoming vegan” but I know I’m not alone in having held out hope for SR’s moves “against the depredations of anthropocentrism”(to quote the original “mission statement”) not simply stopping at the ontological.

My sense is that talk in these terms immediately marginalizes such folks for the reasons I outline. Spinoza, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari all have a profound influence in this connection. Likewise with Marx’s critiques of abstract normatively as a reflection of ideology. Similarly, most Levinasians would be reluctant to talk in these terms. The term just has too many connotations of discipline, governmentality, and judgment, all of which continental thought has striven mightily to overcome. These emerging discourses might get the upper hand, but I’m not holding my breath. It smacks too much of the “micro-fascisms” that D&G and Foucault all strove to overcome. Moreover, I have a hard time seeing the lit, cultural studies, or humanities folk getting excited about these things or finding it very relevant to their work. They set a lot of the agenda here. Appeal to norms is a lot less sexy than talk of just, struggles against power, Marxist revolution, etc. It also smacks too much of Habermas, who is kinda universally loathed in those discourses. It’s a tremendous rhetorical blunder in my view, as is a lot of the talk of rationality; not because we should be irrational, but because rationality as often conceived has been compellingly linked to a number of forms of domination. This goes back to Kant as a “state philosopher” and deontological moral theory as a formalization of neo-liberal power structures underlying the legal system, dissimulating the power, gender, and class interests that lie behind these things. Along the lines of Cicero’s critique of earlier stoicism, philosophical medicine should be expressed in a way that is appropriate to affecting it’s audience. The web of signifying relations underlying the term “normatively” is, in my view, woefully inadequate in this regard. Perhaps the term is here to stay but that doesn’t mean we should assist, through our own use of language, in further entrenching it. Words have an agency of their own that often works behind the awareness of conscious thought, so unless one has forgotten the observations of Lacan and Derrida, holding that transcendental signifiers are possibl and that these connotations are harmless to discourse as a whole, I think the term is best abandoned unless one happens to like judgment, the primacy of rules, etc. Additionally, it’s extremely telling and confirmation of my criticisms thAt talk of eudaimonia or flourishing is not front and center in the allegedly non-deontological variants of so-called normative discourses.

I’m completely on board with those sorts of questions and issues. I’ve also written a number of posts arguing for extending the domain of the ethical beyond its focus on the human (here, here and here) for instance). So a few points here:

First, the reason that Craig’s post was a “dick” move was because he was basically saying that because I didn’t mention something in this particular post I reject those things and concerns. Now, given that Craig is a fan of Derrida he is presumably familiar with the fact that our experience is necessarily structured by time. And because our experience is necessarily structured by time, you can’t talk about everything at once. I can’t, for example, talk about signifiers when I’m talking about physics. But I can talk about signifiers and signs on another occasion! Had Craig been following discussion, he would have known where I stand on these particular issues. Instead, I think, he was trying to score points. As Joseph pointed out, he could have generated an interesting discussion had he posed his question in a less confrontational manner.

Second, the thesis that humans are not at the center of being does not entail the thesis that humans are to be excluded or ignored. It seems that a lot of folks think in very black and white terms and have a hard time not concluding the opposite when a particular claim is rejected. Consequently, if speculative realists say “humans aren’t at the center of being and everything isn’t related to humans” you suddenly get an outraged peanut gallery saying things like “you’re rejecting humans!”, “you hate humans!”, “you’re nihilistic!” “you believe that we should ignore humans!” I’m not exaggerating here. When SR and OOO first began to break in the blogosphere a number of people said exactly these sorts of things. Why people should have a hard time grasping that what takes place in a volcanic vent three thousand feet beneath the seas really has nothing to do with humans is beyond me. Why they believe that pointing this out is somehow an affront to humans is even more beyond me.

Anyway, my point in this rant (and I’m not accusing you of any of this, I’m just venting) is that decentralizing the human doesn’t suddenly lead to the conclusion that questions of human flourishing and how we might attain human flourishing disappear. They’re still there, just as they were before and there’s nothing contradictory in an object-oriented ontologist being passionately concerned with questions of human flourishing and questions of politics.

I think, however, you really get at the nub of the issue when you ask what should be done when human flourishing brings about the misery and suffering of other creatures. I think the first important point is to note, as Whitehead so nicely put it in Process and Reality, that all life necessarily lives from death. This is unavoidable. The question then becomes what “rights” the nonhuman might intrinsically have and whether we have necessary duties to the nonhuman. I think there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done. The question would be one of the grounds of these “rights”. Am I obligated to the natural and the animal, for example, because I live from these things, such that if I destroy them or over exploit them, I’m negating my own being? This would be a sort of utilitarian or pragmatic argument that comes back entirely to the human. Here it would be that I have an obligation to these things not because I genuinely have an obligation to these things, but because I have an obligation to myself.

This route, I think, works in a lot of cases, but there are a lot more that don’t exist. Everyone always focuses on the treatment of animals, and that’s important, but what about inorganic matter, for example? For example, suppose I can engage in mountain top strip mining in a way that doesn’t poison the environment but just makes it ugly. Given that this activity wouldn’t amount to sawing off the branch we’re sitting on and that the resources gained from this mining might be very useful, does this mean that we should go ahead and do it? Put differently, is there a way in which we can wrong nonhuman objects even if we’re not poisoning ourselves? Do we wrong the mountain when we do this? How, and on what grounds? It seems to me that this is what you and Craig are getting at.

This is ultimately the sort of direction I’d like to go in, but I’m left with the question of how to accomplish such a move philosophically. Tim Morton seems to have no problem here. In The Ecological Thought he says things like you don’t need some profound philosophical reason to grab the little girl in the street before the car hits her, you just know to do it. Likewise, he would argue, I think, you don’t need a deep philosophical reason not to remove the mountain top, you just know that there’s something deeply wrong about doing this. I suspect a lot of this arises out of Tim’s Levinasianism, where the call of the Other issues not just from other persons, but from animals and the natural world itself. I really like Tim’s sentiment here and am largely in agreement with him, but I still feel like there needs to be more argument here. (When I finally get around to The Imperative by Lingis I hope to get some of the resources that would allow me to think through these things).

Another issue here would be that of whether or not the conflict you set up between human flourishing and the misery of the nonhuman accurately portrays what human flourishing might be. One of my favorite points that the Hellenistic thinkers make is not only that philosophy should be about eudaimonia, flourishing, and concretely situated in life, but also that while we all readily recognize that we desire eudaimonia, we don’t know what eudaimonia is. The question of what the good life is, is an open question and a central domain of philosophical inquiry. It’s very easy to think about human flourishing in crass economic terms. Here flourishing would amount to simply fulfilling my appetites, having all the resources I want, getting the kick-ass SUV I want, etc., etc., etc. As a consequence, satisfying these desires would put me directly in opposition to the nonhuman. Because I want a “turducken“, I think nothing of raising all sorts of turkeys, ducks, and chickens under very cruel conditions so that I might stuff a chicken within a duck and a duck within a turkey for my Thanksgiving dinner. Because a person loves pate, they think nothing of stuffing all sorts of food down a gooses gullet so that it will be all tender and fatty. Because someone wants that kick-ass SUV, they think nothing of the war it causes, its environmental impact, and so on.

Yet one of the reasons that the Hellenistic thinkers are proposing a sort of therapy or medicine is precisely because we can be mistaken about our desires, our values, our wants or those things that promote our flourishing. The question then would be whether flourishing must necessarily come into conflict with nonhumans. The Taoists, for example, emphasize the manner in which we’re interrelated and how part of achieving human flourishing lies in opening ourselves to these nonhuman differences, rather than striving to master, control, and fully posses them. I guess what I’m getting at is that we would first have to know what human flourishing is before being able to determine whether it necessarily has a conflictual relationship to the nonhuman. It may be that many of the things we believe promote our flourishing actually create our misery and that a vital component of eudaimonia is a certain aesthetic activity that recognizes that no matter how useful those resources in the mountain top might be for certain technologies, the aesthetic cost outweighs this utilitarian gain.

I really think we’re only at the beginnings here and that as of yet we lack the vocabulary and concepts that would allow us to work through all these questions and issues. Copernicus decentered humans from the heart of creation. Freud and Marx undermined the centrality of the individual or our mastery over ourselves. Humans as we know them right now have only been around for about 250,000 years. These fundamental shifts have only occurred within the last three hundred years. There’s a lot more work to be done, I think.

I do not doubt your points about rhetoric: it is not exactly a sexy term of art and won’t appeal to certain segments of academics. I’m also wary about its “web of signifying relations” as you put it. But there are plenty of similar problems with terms that could serve a similar function and yet do not have the same degree of relatively settled technical meaning that normativity has accrued amongst some quarters. Take your example of flourishing, which condenses an organicist, teleological and essentialist atmosphere with connotations of vigor, health and vitalism. This has its downsides and turn-offs too,
whilst it lacks the kind of extended usage that normativity has acquired — it being a stretch to talk of semantic flourishing or epistemic flourishing, say.

Maybe you are right that there is a tactical blunder going on here though insofar as people like me, Reid and Pete are not primarly seeking to engage mainline analytic philosophers but a rather more heterogenous audience. More thought on terminology is probably in order.

Let’s not forget that Pete has repeatedly dismissed my points about Nietzsce, Freud, Lacan, D&G, Spinoza, Marx, etc vis a vis deontological models of thought; all of which are vital to a eudaimonistic project as the pertain to the sorts of affects that haunt us and forms of social relations that are highly conflictual and create a lot of suffering. As I recall you’ve ratified his position regarding the relevance of these sorts of psychological and sociological issues. And now we even read Reid rejecting the Marx in Marx, dismissing the role that historical and material conditions play in the values we embrace and the conditions under which change becomes possible. Indeed, he ends up towing the neo-liberal line about Marx as a determinist and Leninian totalitarianism. In my view, this was exactly what was to be expected as a consequence of the agency of the letter in the unconscious, just as it comes as no surprise that the Frankfurt School would culminate in Habermas after as a consequence of Adorno making his Kantian turn and betraying Marxism. It’s not as if my suspicions here come out of left field.

Thanks for your generous reply, Levi. I am, of course, in agreement with much of what you say here.

It is my strong contention that genuine human flourishing can only come into being as a co-flourishing with the non-human. This would be a practical consequence of decentering the human if not abandoning the notion altogether.

I do agree that Levinas is an important resource here. I haven’t read Tim’s work yet, but Graham’s essay “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the Non-Human” made some suggestive moves in this direction.

My very first comment on Pete’s work (in this post last year) was to challenge his articulation of normativity in deontological terms, and that initial sense of unease has only grown since. I haven’t been able to follow your more recent discussions with him on this issue as closely as I’d have liked, so I’m not sure exactly what disagreement you’re referring to here. But in comments here on one of your previous posts I have reiterated the sort of Lukácsian worries there are with this position. So, I’m not sure why you think I side with Pete on this: it’s precisely here where we disagree.

I haven’t fully digested Reid’s interpretation of Marx yet but he does not appear to dismiss the role that historical and material conditions play in the values we embrace. It seems to me that he is trying to develop the analytical tools to understand the dependency of critical authority on a conjunction of historically dynamic social and material relations. There are Habermasian dead-ends lurking here but there’s no reason to suppose that Reid is going to head down them or end up advocating some wet, Rawls-lite liberalism. In any case, it is still early days for this project.

My mistake. I had remembered it differently. Like I said, the word “normativity” gets in the way, immediately evoking images of legalism and judgmental white guys trying to regulate others. Were you to use words like ethics, justice, flourishing, etc., this discussion wouldn’t even occur. Perhaps you’re right about Reid. I thought his remarks about historical determinism and the dictatorship of the proletariat were pretty revealing. Vis a vis the dictatorship of the proletariat, I guess Reid thinks all those who hold the reigns of power, military, money, and resources are just going to voluntarily give up that power when they’re “rationally persuaded” and shown how norms, rules, and the structure of rationality reveal the irrationality of their actions.

Levi,
I’m just joining the conversation late, and I’m going to skip a bunch of this, but this discussion is missing the crucial link: Foucault, who specifically uses the care of the self as a way to counter the dominant deontological scheme of post-Kantian visions of power in the History of Sexuality Vol. 2. He gets some of this from Pierre Hadot, whose What is Philosophy? I am teaching to frame my ancient phil. class for precisely this reason. i think Foucault’s view is a bit totalizing (Plato’s Laws stands out, for example, as regulative and regulating), but really insightful. Also, this would include Cicero, from whom one does have reason to cite within the natural law tradition. I love teaching Cicero, though, and this reminds me that one day, I really need to write that book on how the Romans didn’t screw up everything in philosophy.

I was going to reply, but there is little point. Levi’s reply to Marc (@17) does not advance the discussion and it is clear there is little hope of doing so, especially when we get to childish outbursts (@21). I was clearly wrong in my imagining that I was dealing with adults (@8) who were able to discuss issues without prefacing them with mumbling adulations (@12). It is hard to believe that Levi has–or is even willing to–engage in ethical reflection beyond the human when he regularly posts recipes for grilled meats.

I probably shouldn’t ask here, but Craig, given your criteria as to what it means to open ethical reflection beyond the human, I’m curious as to your position on the dietary habits of lions and other primates. Why would eating meat entail that humans lack the capacity for ethical reflection beyond the human for humans, yet we wouldn’t condemn lions for these dietary habits? Don’t you here show your anthropocentric cards and that you’re not really thinking beyond the human at all? And isn’t the ethical question not so much that of whether or not one eats meat, but, as Derrida puts it, about eating well? I’m really floored by your remark here. I’m generally pretty sympathetic to the animal rights folks, but whoa!

Levi, I’ll answer your question under the impression that it is sincere–it is a standard reactionary response given by many when confronted with a “pro-animal” argument and is, in most respects, akin to arguing that it is okay to eat animals because they taste so good. First, I think the answer to your question is found in the question itself: what sort of being is capable of ethical reflection? Well, it seems to be that case that most normally developed adults (maybe down to teenagers, but certainly not pre-teens) of our species are capable of ethical reflection. The capacity for engaging in ethical reflection is a necessary condition for engaging with the world in an ethical manner: if you can’t think ethically, you can’t act ethically–and if you can’t act ethically, chances are you can’t think ethically either. Second, ethics presupposes a real choice. It requires recognition that a particular course of action is or is not right, being able to adjudicate between these options, and then choosing the correct one. I take it as uncontroversial that it applies to nearly all ethical theories (e.e., deontological, utilitarian, capabilities, care, etc). Third, the question is: does the lion have the requisite capacities to engage in ethical behavior? It would seem that the lion does not–after all, the lion has evolved to become a meat-killing machine and requires an extremely high amount of animal protein to survive. (Call me dated, but I’m pretty sure that the early modern thesis of natural right is correct: whatever other rights a being may or may not have, it seems pretty clear that a begin has the right to ensure its own survival.) A lion lacks the capacity to reflect upon its eating habits (although it might–I don’t know–make decisions regarding which species to prey upon or which particular animal to attack; I don’t know much about lions) and, as such, cannot be held accountable for its eating habits.

Now, there are interesting problems that could develop. There seems to be something resembling “moral behavior” in many mammals, but these behaviors tend to be restricted to members of the same species–but also extend beyond close genetic relatives, contra much evolutionary biology (e.g., Dawkins). I’ve seen a dog cross a major highway in an effort to rescue his friend who has been hit by a car and try to drag his dying friend to the side of the road. Vampire bats share blood with unsuccessful hunters and teach one another how to nurse. Bonobos seem to be capable of intentionally lying.

I wonder if your recourse to Derrida is not disingenuous. The counterpart to “eating well” when it comes to consuming animals is “killing well.” That’s not an argument I’m interested in making: I take it as uncontroversial that the elaborate plotting of another’s death for fickle and fleeting enjoyment is something that is not moral, regardless of how nicely you go about it. Is this the line of argument you want to open up? “With every bite, I cause death!”

I think you quite miss the point of my question. My example is not designed to justify eating animals but to raise the question of whether or not you have really articulated a post-humanist ethics. Your answer suggests a deep anthopocentrism in your position as you restrict the capacity of ethics to the human, asserting a fundamental gap between the human and animal such that the culinary practices of great white sharks has no bearing on these ethical questions. A post-humanist ethics would, I think have to refuse this sort of special place for humans.

Additionally, while it’s neither here nor there, the issue of whether I eat meat is irrelevant to whether my claims about post-humanist ethics are true. If a liar says that lying is wrong the fact that he lies does not undermine the truth of the claim that he is lying. It makes him a hypocrite. Your remark was ad hominem. Further it is up to you to establish that post-humanist ethics entails not eating meat. I think this is a tough argument to convincingly make. Scu’s arguments about the impact of meat on health and destruction of the environment are far more convincing, but they are also thoroughly humanist (ie, about how WE benefit from not eating meat). Further, they don’t fully establish his conclusion as meat in moderation and raised in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment would undermine the force of his argument.

As for Derrida, the issue is ontological. Is it possible to live without living from death. If not, then the question becomes one of how to relate ethically to death. Derrida is pretty explicit that the question is not about whether or not we should eat meat. Does anyone know whether he was a vegetarian?

“The issue of whether I eat meat is irrelevant to whether my claims about post-humanist ethics are true.”

“Does anyone know whether he was a vegetarian?”

Derrida was not a vegetarian, but why does it matter if, as you write, whether or not one eats meat, it’s irrelevant to one’s claims.

I don’t know what to make of your reading habits, but Craig explicitly suggests that non-human animals might have ethics and yet you state that he “restrict[s] the capacity of ethics to the human” – how is possible that you are such an uncharitable reader of those who disagree with you while almost always complaining that others do not read your posts carefully enough?

Plus, to point out that some things are unique to humans (if ethics were in fact unique to humans) is not the same as to be anthropocentric, I think it’s quite obvious. Otherwise, if I were to suggest that there are qualities unique to uranium, then I would be uranium-centric.

I see that you often complain that people accuse you of dismissing humans while you say you only put them on the same level as other objects, but you’re not helping your case when every time someone mentions humans, you accuse them of being “anthropocentric” and generally get very irritated.

“Your answer suggests a deep anthopocentrism in your position as you restrict the capacity of ethics to the human, asserting a fundamental gap between the human and animal such that the culinary practices of great white sharks has no bearing on these ethical questions.”

Levi, apparently you missed the second paragraph in my last comment where I explicitly raise the question of the moral capacities of animals, especially mammals.

Because you missed it the first time, I’ll quote myself (I’ve emphasized where I’ve clearly claimed that animals other than humans exhibit moral behaviours):

“Now, there are interesting problems that could develop. There seems to be something resembling “moral behavior” in many mammals, but these behaviors tend to be restricted to members of the same species–but also extend beyond close genetic relatives, contra much evolutionary biology (e.g., Dawkins).”

I also gave three examples of moral behaviour in animals other than humans:

“I’ve seen a dog cross a major highway in an effort to rescue his friend who has been hit by a car and try to drag his dying friend to the side of the road. Vampire bats share blood with unsuccessful hunters and teach one another how to nurse. Bonobos seem to be capable of intentionally lying.”

However, I remain skeptical that the moral capacities of animals extends into dietary choices. But it is clearly the case that there is strong evidence that morality plays a role in group formation in animals beyond near genetic relatives–rules of fair play, food distribution, teaching, etc. But, the evidence for extra-species moral behavior is largely anecdotal: chimps saving children who fall into pits at zoos; dogs and cats waking up humans when the house is burning down; dolphins assisting drowning humans; etc. A good introduction to the literature is Bekoff & Peirce’ Wild Justice. However, the argument is fairly obvious: if evolution is correct, then it is necessarily the case that other species have the ability to act ethically. I am thoroughly anti-anthropocentric in this regard: humans and many species of animals can act ethically, however, it would appear that the capacity to act ethically is limited by species; ethics “means” something else to coyotes than it does to humans or bats–all species of which clearly display some sort of ethical behavior. It is possible, given the broader range of ethical action open to humans, that humans are unique–or almost unique–in their ability to act ethically beyond the boundary of their own species. I don’t see how I articulate a “clear break” between species given that I don’t articulate any such break at all.

It is not anthropocentric to argue that different objects differ in capacities: a toaster is much better at toasting bread than I am, but, at the same time, I am fair more skilled at tying my own shoes than the toaster is–different object; different capacities. Humans clearly have the capacity for ethical thought and action. (I doubt many people seriously challenge this claim.) It isn’t clear that all animals have a capacity for ethical action, although it is clear that some do (I’ve pointed to chimps, bonobos, dogs, coyotes, vampire bats and rats as examples). I’m happy to say that the vampire bat who refuses to share blood with an unsuccessful neighbour given that blood sharing appears to be normative among vampire bloods has caused a moral harm to its neighbour. I’m also happy to say that a human who insists on consuming animal products has caused a direct moral harm to that animal. I’m also happy to say that the shark when it eats a fish has caused moral harm to that fish, however, the shark is not the sort of being that can be held morally accountable for their actions–in the same way that an eight year old human child is not morally accountable for murder when it causes the death of another human. There’s no anthropocentrism here–just as there is no anthropocentrism when I say that a human, lacking the capacity to fly, makes a poor seagull. Can I put it any more clearly? All humans–having reached a certain stage of normal development–are capable of ethical action; all members of certain species of animals–having reached a certain stage of normal development–are also capable of ethical action. What it “means” for a human to act ethically is different than what it “means” for a rat to act ethically; it is unfair to the rat to hold it to human standards, just as it is unfair to the human to hold it to rat standards. To argue anything else is silly–and most likely anthropocentric.

It is clear from your comment @30 that you have no interest in discussing the interests of animals and taking them as morally significant–you immediately subsume animal interests to the interests of humans; viz., “they don’t fully establish his conclusion as meat in moderation and raised in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment.” I don’t see how anyone could be more anthropocentric and humanistic in orientation: your ethics has constant recourse to “for us.” You also demonstrate significant ignorance about animals, the contemporary and historical human uses of animals, and the existing moral positions relating to human use of animals.

Lastly, it is not ad hominem to assert that someone who enjoys the fickle and vain consumption of animals cannot possibly take their interests seriously: it is analogous to the slave master claiming to the take the interests of his slaves seriously–so long as they remain slaves, of course. If you are the sort of person who acts in ways that does not take into account the interests of others it is prima facie the case that you do not take their interests seriously–otherwise you would act differently. And, worse, you subsume the interests of the living to some strange notion of “the environment”!

Jared, Im the one being uncharitable in this thread? Craig is accomplishing nor thing however. He’s persuading me to be thoroughly unsympathetic to critical animal theory and his arguments. He’s all over the place here.